Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign megathread v2 (pg 77 - declares victory in Iowa)

[ON Progressive]

I'm of the school of thought that the reason the number is so high was because of protest votes in the primary from conservative Democrats. As someone who talked to these people on the ground in 2016, I can confirm firsthand that these people had little intention of voting for Bernie once Fox beat the socialism drum enough. They voted for Bernie because they simply couldn't vote in the Republican primary for Trump/Cruz. For the large part, they never agreed with us and were always going to defect. They just wanted to stop Hillary.

That is pretty much what it is. Bernie 2016 did quite well in places with a lot of Demosaurs like West Virginia/Eastern Kentucky/FL Panhandle/Western NC/etc., which means it's not surprising that Bernie 2016 (or any Democrat who does unusually well in those sorts of places) will have some defections.

Even still, the defection rate wasn't actually all that special:

In the VOTER Survey, only 3 percent of those supporting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz reported voting for Hillary Clinton, as did 10 percent of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s supporters and 32 percent of Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s supporters. So Sanders supporters were about as likely to vote for Trump as Rubio’s supporters were to vote for Clinton, and far less likely than Kasich supporters were to vote for Clinton.

Based on data from the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, a YouGov survey that also interviewed respondents multiple times during the [2008] campaign, 24 percent of people who supported Clinton in the primary as of March 2008 then reported voting for McCain in the general election

An analysis of a different 2008 survey by the political scientists Michael Henderson, Sunshine Hillygus and Trevor Thompson produced a similar estimate: 25 percent

[GeneralMacArthur]

8 tweets the day before the 2016 election trashing Hillary with lies and smears.  From Bernie Sanders current senior advisor and speechwriter, David Sirota.  He's also the guy who writes all the tweets from Bernie's twitter accounts.  And the guy spearheading the "Biden wants to cut social security" attack from the Sanders campaign.  And the guy Bernie was, for a long time (perhaps even 2016, who knows?) secretly paying to attack Bernie's rivals while masquerading as an independent journalist.

By the way, notice how the last tweet is attacking Hillary for... wanting to cut social security.  The Sanders campaign also tried to lay this attack on Hillary during the primary.  It's a Sanders classic.  I'm sure it's all a big coincidence though.

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/695764254855733248?s=19

[Cinemark]

That feeling when all those repressed 2016 memories come flying back. Still planning on voting for Sanders if he's the nominee, but I wont be happy about it.

Edit: Like, I'll get over it. But I think some of us forget how heated the 2016 primary got. And most of that heat didn't come from the Hillary camp.

[ON Progressive]

That feeling when all those repressed 2016 memories come flying back. Still planning on voting for Sanders if he's the nominee, but I wont be happy about it.

Edit: Like, I'll get over it. But I think some of us forget how heated the 2016 primary got. And most of that heat didn't come from the Hillary camp.

Oh please, the 2016 primary was barely even heated. It wasn't even the most heated 2016 primary (the Republican primary was significantly worse in that front).

If you want a heated primary, take a look at the 2008 Democratic primary where both the Obama and Clinton campaigns just spent weeks constantly going on press conferences with pretty nasty attacks against each other.

[Cinemark]

That feeling when all those repressed 2016 memories come flying back. Still planning on voting for Sanders if he's the nominee, but I wont be happy about it.

Edit: Like, I'll get over it. But I think some of us forget how heated the 2016 primary got. And most of that heat didn't come from the Hillary camp.

Oh please, the 2016 primary was barely even heated. It wasn't even the most heated 2016 primary (the Republican primary was significantly worse in that front).

If you want a heated primary, take a look at the 2008 Democratic primary where both the Obama and Clinton campaigns just spent weeks constantly going on press conferences with pretty nasty attacks against each other.

I think the difference between 2008 and 2016 was how prevalent social media was in 2016 compared to 2008. Hillary was constantly smeared from both the left and the right during 2016. Yeah, Bernie himself didn't have a huge part in it, but his surrogates and supporters certainly did.

[bilaps]

How many days Bernie Sanders spent on the stump for Hillary? For a primary opponent which was basicaly set up for her to win. For a person who tried stuff like auto bailout attack, talking about supporting vigilantes at the border. Yet, 8 tweets from a person who even wasn't at the Bernie campaign in 2016 are more important. I understand people having agendas and being hacks, but come on, enough is enough.

[Non Swing Voter]

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/19/hugh-hewitt-vote-bernie-sanders-virginia-democrati/

seems like he's obviously trying to signal to his MAGA followers to influence the Democratic election where they are able to.

[walleye26]

I mean with no real GOP opposition to Trump, I was wondering if this type of thing would happen.

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

Can't really see this working.  You have to either (a) live in a state that has open primaries or (b) actually change your registration if you live in a state with a closed primary (assuming you're not a Democrat that plans on voting for Trump in the general).

In the case of the latter, it doesn't take all that much effort to change your party registration, but it's probably more than most people want to undertake. 

[Non Swing Voter]

Can't really see this working.  You have to either (a) live in a state that has open primaries or (b) actually change your registration if you live in a state with a closed primary (assuming you're not a Democrat that plans on voting for Trump in the general).

In the case of the latter, it doesn't take all that much effort to change your party registration, but it's probably more than most people are going to undertake.  

I wonder how many states have open primaries?  In Virginia you don't register by party so you just select a blue primary ballot or a red one.  Which is kind of awkward because on primary day you can essentially see who is a democrat and who is a republican (I'm in a 50/50 precinct).

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

Can't really see this working.  You have to either (a) live in a state that has open primaries or (b) actually change your registration if you live in a state with a closed primary (assuming you're not a Democrat that plans on voting for Trump in the general).

In the case of the latter, it doesn't take all that much effort to change your party registration, but it's probably more than most people are going to undertake.  

I wonder how many states have open primaries?  In Virginia you don't register by party so you just select a blue primary ballot or a red one.  Which is kind of awkward because on primary day you can essentially see who is a democrat and who is a republican (I'm in a 50/50 precinct).

About half (not including territories) if my reading memory serves me correctly. 

[Cinemark]

How many days Bernie Sanders spent on the stump for Hillary? For a primary opponent which was basicaly set up for her to win. For a person who tried stuff like auto bailout attack, talking about supporting vigilantes at the border. Yet, 8 tweets from a person who even wasn't at the Bernie campaign in 2016 are more important. I understand people having agendas and being hacks, but come on, enough is enough.

After a certain point, it didnt matter what Bernie did. There was so much vitriol and conspiracies spewed at Hillary over social media that many of his supporters wanted nothing to do with her. Multiple speakers got boo'ed at the convention, Hillary supporters were harassed at rallies by Bernie supporters, the whole Nevada incident. I can go on. The PUMA's from 2008 never even came close to any of that.

And yeah, the DNC set up the primaries in a way that basically treated Hillary as the incumbent. It screwed over Sanders multiple times but nobody thought Hillary was going to face any sort of challenge when the schedule was set up. With that said, the sheer amount of conspiracies theories spread by Sanders supporters about how the DNC was rigging the actual votes for Hillary was some of the dirtiest sh**te I've seen in my 20+ years of following politics.   

[Pericles]

That feeling when all those repressed 2016 memories come flying back. Still planning on voting for Sanders if he's the nominee, but I wont be happy about it.

Edit: Like, I'll get over it. But I think some of us forget how heated the 2016 primary got. And most of that heat didn't come from the Hillary camp.

Oh please, the 2016 primary was barely even heated. It wasn't even the most heated 2016 primary (the Republican primary was significantly worse in that front).

If you want a heated primary, take a look at the 2008 Democratic primary where both the Obama and Clinton campaigns just spent weeks constantly going on press conferences with pretty nasty attacks against each other.

I think the difference between 2008 and 2016 was how prevalent social media was in 2016 compared to 2008. Hillary was constantly smeared from both the left and the right during 2016. Yeah, Bernie himself didn't have a huge part in it, but his surrogates and supporters certainly did.

The 2016 Republican primary was in 2016 though too. Bernie never said Hillary was "utterly amoral" (Ted Cruz on Trump), or that her "domestic policies would lead to recession" and "foreign policies would make America and the world less safe" (Mitt Romney on Trump), as just some examples of the common insanely negative (but true) rhetoric Republicans used against Trump.

[I Can Now Die Happy]

Can't really see this working.  You have to either (a) live in a state that has open primaries or (b) actually change your registration if you live in a state with a closed primary (assuming you're not a Democrat that plans on voting for Trump in the general).

In the case of the latter, it doesn't take all that much effort to change your party registration, but it's probably more than most people want to undertake.  

Yeah in NY it's particularly strict in that registration must happen about a year before the date of said election (or something along those lines) which is why when I became a citizen a little over a year ago, I made sure to register as a Democrat.

I honestly don't expect right-wing intervention in the Democratic Primary to be decisive, but sometimes things do get interesting.

In one of my right-wing election Twitter group chats I just had a debate with someone who says they plan on voting Biden in order to stop Bernie because they think Bernie has a better chance of winning (populistic, anti establishment, potentially strong with the white working class in MI/WI/PA; whereas Biden is incoherent, neoliberal, establishment, etc). I'm still trying to convince them to vote Bernie instead.

A Youtuber by the name of Tarl "Styxhexenhammer666" Warwick wants right-leaning people to vote Biden in order to make sure that Bernie's style of politics is repudiated (and to prevent Vermont from being 'embarrassed' because that's where Tarl is from). While I'm a fan of his I don't agree with it.

My vote will be going to Bernie - if not Bernie, then either Tulsi or Yang. Again, I don't expect intervention from my kind to be decisive, but it's certainly going to cause some uproar and strife which is always welcome in the D primaries in my book.

#DownWithTheEstablishment

[GeneralMacArthur]

How many days Bernie Sanders spent on the stump for Hillary? For a primary opponent which was basicaly set up for her to win. For a person who tried stuff like auto bailout attack, talking about supporting vigilantes at the border. Yet, 8 tweets from a person who even wasn't at the Bernie campaign in 2016 are more important. I understand people having agendas and being hacks, but come on, enough is enough.

I wrote this thread about this subject:  https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=354294.0

After running a scorched-earth campaign where he was still attacking the nominee in June/July and creating mayhem at the convention and endorsing the WikiLeaks attack as an avenue towards blackmailing the Democratic Party, Sanders gave a begrudging speech where the only nice things he could say about Clinton were "she agrees with me on some issues", disappeared for several months to write a book about how great his campaign was, demanded a private plane and all sorts of concessions from Clinton just to campaign for her, and then his campaign events were the same begrudging speech and self-aggrandizement.  He barely mentioned Clinton during those events, just saying "anyone but Trump", which left the door open to 14% of his supporters voting for someone who was neither Trump nor Clinton.

But you don't have to take my word for it.  There aren't many of those Sanders "stumping for Hillary" events on YouTube.  But here is the first one I could find.  Sanders appears at around the 47 minute mark and speaks for maybe 40 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Sxy5Plw9yQ

Go watch the video and tell me my description isn't accurate.  I re-watched about half of it to confirm that my memories are not blurred at all.  Sanders mainly repeats his stump speech and praises himself, gets in a lot of sick burns on Trump and the Republicans, and mentions Clinton maybe a dozen times and each time is "this is what I have been arguing, and Clinton understands this", "Clinton will be better on this than Trump", things like that.

Here's an example.  Direct quote from the video.

In America today, we have millions of working people, working for wages that are too damn low.  You can do the arithmetic as well as I can, and figure out that if someone is making the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, that person can not make it economically.  Not at 7.25, not at 9, not at 10 bucks an hour.  What Secretary Clinton knows, what you know, and what I know, and what Donald Trump does not know, is that we have got to raise the minimum wage to a living wage.  In my view, that minimum wage should be 15 dollars an hour.  And that is what the Democratic platform calls for.

To put this in context, Sanders had criticized Clinton very harshly throughout the primary for wanting the minimum wage to be $12 an hour rather than $15, and then blackmailed the Democratic Party into letting him re-write the platform to say $15.

I would say that in this quote, Sanders is mainly self-aggrandizing, and saying essentially that "Clinton is better than Trump, although I think she should go further, and I wrote that into the platform."

[bilaps]

How many days Bernie Sanders spent on the stump for Hillary? For a primary opponent which was basicaly set up for her to win. For a person who tried stuff like auto bailout attack, talking about supporting vigilantes at the border. Yet, 8 tweets from a person who even wasn't at the Bernie campaign in 2016 are more important. I understand people having agendas and being hacks, but come on, enough is enough.

After a certain point, it didnt matter what Bernie did. There was so much vitriol and conspiracies spewed at Hillary over social media that many of his supporters wanted nothing to do with her. Multiple speakers got boo'ed at the convention, Hillary supporters were harassed at rallies by Bernie supporters, the whole Nevada incident. I can go on. The PUMA's from 2008 never even came close to any of that.

And yeah, the DNC set up the primaries in a way that basically treated Hillary as the incumbent. It screwed over Sanders multiple times but nobody thought Hillary was going to face any sort of challenge when the schedule was set up. With that said, the sheer amount of conspiracies theories spread by Sanders supporters about how the DNC was rigging the actual votes for Hillary was some of the dirtiest sh**te I've seen in my 20+ years of following politics.   

You miss the point though. Why are Bernie supporters acted towards Hillary like that? Maybe just maybe she deserved it. Maybe just maybe not all of these people are sexist. Maybe they saw flaws in her as a candidate. Maybe she didn't help by going after Bernie for gun control thing, guy who had a D- rating from NRA while he said all along that he isn't going for her on e-mails. And the DNC rigged the thing for her, not just the DNC of course, but entire establishment and people have felt betrayed. Maybe they would expect this from Republicans, not from Democrats. Wow, people got booed at the convention, that have to hurt their feelings, how will these politicians ever recover like DWS. Lol. Come on man.

[bilaps]

How many days Bernie Sanders spent on the stump for Hillary? For a primary opponent which was basicaly set up for her to win. For a person who tried stuff like auto bailout attack, talking about supporting vigilantes at the border. Yet, 8 tweets from a person who even wasn't at the Bernie campaign in 2016 are more important. I understand people having agendas and being hacks, but come on, enough is enough.

I wrote this thread about this subject:  https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=354294.0

After running a scorched-earth campaign where he was still attacking the nominee in June/July and creating mayhem at the convention and endorsing the WikiLeaks attack as an avenue towards blackmailing the Democratic Party, Sanders gave a begrudging speech where the only nice things he could say about Clinton were "she agrees with me on some issues", disappeared for several months to write a book about how great his campaign was, demanded a private plane and all sorts of concessions from Clinton just to campaign for her, and then his campaign events were the same begrudging speech and self-aggrandizement.  He barely mentioned Clinton during those events, just saying "anyone but Trump", which left the door open to 14% of his supporters voting for someone who was neither Trump nor Clinton.

But you don't have to take my word for it.  There aren't many of those Sanders "stumping for Hillary" events on YouTube.  But here is the first one I could find.  Sanders appears at around the 47 minute mark and speaks for maybe 40 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Sxy5Plw9yQ

Go watch the video and tell me my description isn't accurate.  I re-watched about half of it to confirm that my memories are not blurred at all.  Sanders mainly repeats his stump speech and praises himself, gets in a lot of sick burns on Trump and the Republicans, and mentions Clinton maybe a dozen times and each time is "this is what I have been arguing, and Clinton understands this", "Clinton will be better on this than Trump", things like that.

Here's an example.  Direct quote from the video.

In America today, we have millions of working people, working for wages that are too damn low.  You can do the arithmetic as well as I can, and figure out that if someone is making the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, that person can not make it economically.  Not at 7.25, not at 9, not at 10 bucks an hour.  What Secretary Clinton knows, what you know, and what I know, and what Donald Trump does not know, is that we have got to raise the minimum wage to a living wage.  In my view, that minimum wage should be 15 dollars an hour.  And that is what the Democratic platform calls for.

To put this in context, Sanders had criticized Clinton very harshly throughout the primary for wanting the minimum wage to be $12 an hour rather than $15, and then blackmailed the Democratic Party into letting him re-write the platform to say $15.

I would say that in this quote, Sanders is mainly self-aggrandizing, and saying essentially that "Clinton is better than Trump, although I think she should go further, and I wrote that into the platform."

Yeah, man, I read until the scorched earth campaign thing. Not gonna waste my time further.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Alot of conservatives think Bernie is the weaker opponent, but we cant be sure due to fact Biden wont testify in a Senate impeachment trial on behalf of his son; therefore, we wont know until GE how damaging the Ukraine scandal is. Right now, it's a guessing game

[I Can Now Die Happy]

Alot of conservatives think Bernie is the weaker opponent, but we cant be sure due to fact Biden wont testify in a Senate impeachment trial on behalf of his son; therefore, we wont know until GE how damaging the Ukraine scandal is. Right now, it's a guessing game

Good point Olo, Biden could very well be weaker!

[Cinemark]

Sorry, I shouldn't have said anything. Lets just focus on beating Trump, shall we.

[Adam Griffin]

Rush Limbaugh tried to encourage conservatives to do this for Hillary Clinton in the South in 2008. Didn't work then, won't work now. Bernie won't have a greater percentage of protest votes in 2020 than he did in 2016: c'mon.

[I Can Now Die Happy]

Bernie won't have a greater percentage of protest votes in 2020 than he did in 2016: c'mon.

Maybe this new decade will be full of surprises...

[Roblox]

People are really acting like the 2016 democratic primary was vicious? Give me a break. For how much centrists like to talk about "Bernie bros" going wild over slight criticisms, they sure do seem to find critiques of their preferred candidate's records sacrilegious.

[Suburbia]

Hewitt is a Never Trump conservative.

He'll write in McMullin or Romney or Kasich.

[Progressive Pessimist]

I would love it if true Trumpist Republicans forsake the primary in their party for this and allow Weld to squeak by in some states.